Just before my Thanksgiving holiday, I finished reading The Martian, by Andy Weir.  This book came highly recommended to me by one of my coworkers a while back, and was something I was keeping an eye on. Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to buying it until after the movie came out and the cost went up – bad timing I guess. However, the book was certainly worth it, and made for an enjoyable read.

The main thing I liked about the novel was the style in which it was written: almost all of it was written as epistolary. Epistolary is a bit of a weak spot for me – I like the thought of reading a novel that is the documentation someone wrote about an event. I also find it interesting that in an epistolary work, the writer must know the immediate consequences of an action they want to write about (just as the subject would) before they begin, but the long-term consequences are hidden. When it wasn’t in epistolary form, Andy Weir used third-person omniscient point of view sections to alert the reader to details Mark Whately couldn’t know. These sections were particularly awesome because the narrator was particularly apathetic – so much so that he would call Mark Whately “The Astronaut” and stated crises in a rather matter-of-fact way. This gave the whole work a calm and analytical feel that made it particularly fun for me.

The other thing that I really enjoyed, was the problem solving of the protagonist. Reading The Martian was like watching an episode of MacGyver – you never really knew how he was going to get out of a problem, but you knew he’d come up with a clever use of the resources he had.

As Jessa can attest, I enjoyed reading The Martian (and talked about the things happening in the story), but I don’t feel like I was left with anything afterward. In particular, the book didn’t change me; it didn’t inspire me, or leave me with anything that made me think about the world in a different way. While that’s not necessarily a requirement for the entertainment I consume, it’s why, after I finished it, I didn’t have much to talk about. The events of the book are cool, and it is a very worthwhile read, but beyond that, it didn’t really deliver.